The Misinformation Age

My trade book with philosopher of physics James Owen Weatherall, The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread, is going to be published by Yale University Press in January 2019.

We use models of social networks to elucidate the social spread of false beliefs. Here is the catalog copy:

Why should we care about having true beliefs? And why do demonstrably false beliefs persist and spread without apparent consequence for the people who hold them? It might seem that there’s an obvious reason that true beliefs matter: false beliefs will hurt you. But if that’s right, then why is it (apparently) irrelevant to many people whether they believe true things or not? In an age riven by factual disputes over everything from climate change to the size of inauguration crowds, the authors argue that social factors, not individual psychology, are what’s essential to understanding the persistence of false belief, and that we must know how those social forces work in order to fight misinformation effectively.